Cédric Klapish’s 2002 comedy, The Spanish Apartment, tells the story of Xavier, a French student who travels to Barcelona to sharpen his Spanish, study economics, and fill out his resume. He’ll get more than he bargained for. Sharing a Spanish apartment with young people from across Europe he discovers a new identity, learning to live and laugh along the way. In the last reel of the film he contemplates photographs of his new friends: “I’m him, and him, and him… I’m her, and her, and her… I’m French, Spanish, English, Danish. I’m not one but many. I’m like Europe, a real mess…”

The film poses some simple questions. How do you navigate an unfamiliar culture? An unfamiliar language? A new city? How do you grow up in a complicated world? The answers it offers are simple, but meaningful. Find some perspective. Climb up. To the Parc Gaudi, the Sagrada Familia. And then immerse yourself in the chaos of friendship and love and laughter.

For our purposes, we can take the film as a particular fantasy: a love letter to European integration & cooperation. The European project never had better press. Indeed, one reviewer described the French-Spanish production as a “love song to the new Europe.” (Rea 2003). But for all the lighthearted fun it is a film full of contradictions. The members of this new multicultural Europe can never escape national stereotypes: the fastidious German, the loutish English, the passionate Spanish. The Barcelona of dreams comes off as clichéd as a tourist postcard. And the larger ambitions of this European fantasy don’t add up to much more than a night on the town of drinking and dancing. (Ezra and Sánchez 2005)